Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high end department stores in the United Kingdom, operated by Selfridges Retail Limited. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1908. The flagship store on London’s Oxford Street is the second largest shop in the UK (after Harrods) and opened 15 March 1909. Other Selfridges stores opened in the Trafford Centre (1998) and Exchange Square (2002) in Manchester, and in the Bullring in Birmingham (2003).
In the 1940s, smaller provincial Selfridge stores were sold to the John Lewis Partnership, and in 1951, the original Oxford Street store was acquired by the Liverpool-based Lewis’s chain of department stores. Lewis’s and Selfridges were then taken over in 1965 by the Sears Group, owned by Charles Clore. Expanded under the Sears Group to include branches in Manchester and Birmingham, the chain was acquired in 2003 by Canada’s Galen Weston for £598 million. The shop’s early history was dramatised in ITV’s 2013 series, Mr Selfridge.
